Four years ago, July 2007, Microsoft released the first few tidbits of information about Windows 7. Vista had just been shipped, and it wasn't received well - both by critics and the marketplace. During these days, I arguedthat for Windows 7, Microsoft ought to scrap the Vista userland, and build an entirely new interface and userland on top of Windows NT, while maintaining a 'classic' Windows version on the side for business and other reluctant folk who want to see the 'new' Windows mature a little bit first. While they didn't do this with Windows 7, they are doing exactly this with Windows 8. Ladies and gentlemen, Windows 8 is the first 'cut the legacy'-release we've all been waiting for - and Microsoft couldn't have picked a better time.

First of all I think you're concluding quite a lot from one small tech demonstration of Windows 8. One that I could personally have coded in Windows 7 in about a week if you gave me the graphical design for each of the tablet screens he was sliding between. Basically we are talking about a simple full-screen app with some tiled widgets and some pretty colors and gradients. Note that I'm not saying it wasn't pretty or good or bad but it showed NOTHING about what architecture Windows 8 is based on.

The mythical rewrite that supposedly fixes everything is a very classic junior developer mistake. Since these forums have a lot of new and/or wanna-be programmers its not uncommon to have this point of view voiced here or on the Internet in general. Only a fool would throw away the biggest ecosystem of applications for the desktop just because Thom from Holland read on the internet that .Net is good and all older languages are bad. Only a fool would waste time rewriting perfectly working things when they could spend 1/10 of that time just addressing the real issue: better OS process sandboxing.

But anyhow if you've studied the history of the infamous Vista they indeed did try to pull this insanely stupid stunt of rewriting things in .Net. You know what happened? The OS got delayed by years and eventually they had to restart the entire project (hint: abandon all code and revert back to the Windows 2003 code). Then because of the delays they were forced to release a barely working version of Windows. I bet everyone at Microsoft knew Vista was crap in the RTM version, but sometimes you just have to release to stay in the game.

For all we know this welcome screen could be only for the tablet edition and the desktop Windows 8 will default to the task menu for the 'legacy' desktop that some of us actually like and prefer over tiles that only really work well on a phone or maybe a tablet.

I think you are right when you say we know shit about Windows 8. We cannot draw many conclusions based on that presentation. On thing is for sure, though: the "tile&widget" interface is going to be present in Windows 8. And its UI will be based on HTML. That's what we know. We don't know if they are going to use that on desktops, too. Thom took just some educated guesses.

As for .NET being good just for "Thom from Holland read on the internet that .Net is good", I have to contradict you. .NET is good because it can run on many platforms - phone, tablet, desktop, server, cloud and Web - , it is good because it takes little time to develop on .Net comparing to alternatives, it's good because the code has a high reusability - i can use on Web stuff I written for the desktop and viceversa - it's good because it's architected to be good and, it's good because you can use RAD tools and it's good because it's not the win32/MFC nightmare.

I develop software for 10+ years and I used C++ exclusively. At the beginning of .NET I disliked it as I thought of it of "yet another java" and I thought that "you can't do performance stuff in .NET". After a few years I've learned .NET and I escaped the win32/MFC nightmare. Not only that I am 2x more productive with .NET, but .NET enables me to do both desktop apps and web sites with ease. If it wasn't for the .Net, I would have to use win32/MFC for desktop and ASP or PHP for the web. More complicated and with probably poorer results because its hard to master 2 entire different technologies and programming paradigms. I would have to stick with either desktop programming, either web programming. Now .NET enables me to use one technology on desktop, web, mobile phones, tablets. I can't really ask more from it.

One thing would be nice, though, a native WPF or Winforms implementation so I don't need to use ugly p/invokes when it's time for heavy lifting.

As about "Only a fool would waste time rewriting perfectly working things", I have to remember you of the company from Cupertino?